An exercise that may be useful to me...sorry about you.

So, on the subject of Tesla. I have been meaning for a while to enter quotes from the fiction book I am (still) reading about Tesla. The Invention of Everything Else. When this book and I first met it was love at first sight (on my part, although it did feel like the book jumped off the shelf at me with open hard-covers). Well, lets see...that was...gosh...seems like...it must have been...two months ago now?! It usually does not take me that long to read a book. If I roll with it, I roll hard and get lost and float to the other world and it is a thrilling ride. Not so with this book. I have found the substance of the story delightful and terribly hard to chew. I can only take a tiny nibble at a time and then I digest. I am nevertheless loyal to the pursuit of this work of fiction. While I often will read fiction and non-fiction at the same time, I rarely will read two fiction books simultaneously, and I have remained committed to this little affair without straying. It may be that I don't want it to end so much that I have implemented the procrastinating that usually happens for me with the last 30 pages of a good book in a more rationed fashion. But, I don't think so. While the method of the book reminds me a great deal of the Incantation of Frida K. I am not nearly as drawn in. I can help myself from reading this book, with other great works I am helplessly compelled. So I must conclude that this is not a great book. But it is compelling in a different sort of way. As a tribute to this book, and a possible impetus for me to finish it, I am going to "quote" the pages that I have thus far doggy eared while reading. Well, not the pages, but the small quotes that persuaded me to doggy ear a specific page in the first place. Only problem is that this is a technique (bad, bad habit) left over from grad school, where I would actually mark the quotes I liked with a pen. In this instance, I am having to search the page for the quote that originally led to my blasphemous fold...So this could take awhile. It will be interesting to see (for me anyways and if not for you then thank goodness this is just a blog and you can move on) what the conglomeration of quotes will be in the end. A trend in what appeals to me? A compelling argument? A hypothesis? By the Way, I understand that context, origin, etc is key in quotations. I am not going to say which character the quotes came from, unless it is one of the historical quotes that Samantha Hunt starts her chapters with. I am also omitting page numbers. I know, blogging is making me lazy. Oh well. "Time and space are not linear. They are curved. When we look at the universe we see atoms, cells, lakes, jellyfish, planets, galaxies. We see circles and curves everywhere. It is the original form, meaning that all life springs from the circle. Think of the pregnant belly. It is my belief that we, as inventors, and scientists, can use this idea, use the curvature of time to cut across it, slicing straight from there to there without following the curve." "The happy swell of your company has left me stranded beside a nest of an angry mother tern who pokes and prods with a sharp beak thirsting for a drop of your glad tidings. I stop. That is idiotic. Words are idiotic." "The struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as the superior" -Nikola Tesla "Its Robert who in the end brings that opening to a close, separating out the emotions like a handful of coins. Here is a nickel. Here is Katherine. A quarter. Jealousy. A dime. Her love. A penny. My work. And then here, separate from all that, our love for each other, a very different thing all together." "Yes I am certain of it. I freeze. There it is. A distinct pain centered in my torso, in my shoulders. It would seem to be my heart. Perhaps I caught something. I shouldn't have touched the girl...Oh, dear, yes. There it is again, a fluttering behind my rib cage and a terrific pain. A fluttering? Is she there beating her wings behind my sternum?" "Love is not as necessary as humans seem to imagine. It is a distraction to thought, and I've always found thought to be far more rewarding than love. Love destroys. Thought creates." "When I tried once to explain to her what it meant to worry, she said, 'I don't think birds do this,' after listening to my description. And of course they don't. Birds are unspoiled by worry, that grave imperfection that keeps humans, heavy, keeps us from flight." "Love does destroy, over and over again. So it is always the greatest surprise to find how stubborn hope can be." "...Louisa's first thoughts are for how, if he were to hold her in his arms, she'd have a very sound place to bury her head...a part of her, a tiny room inside, wonders whether there might be a way to recognize someone you will love before you love him. Maybe time does unfurl in curves rather than straight lines. Maybe it doesn't move from here to there but instead expands in circles." "Stopping here for one moment: Arthur and Louisa are flying, suspended in the ether, nothing but air surrounding them. And perhaps time does move in circles rather than lines. For a fraction of a second they are progress soaring above the world, brief and beautiful, a fraction of a second before progress crashes back down to earth." That is it so far. I think this is a book about love. Or the impossibility of it. So maybe it is a book about loneliness and the ways we humans try to overcome its inevitability. A plight I am certainly familiar with. Books have a way of doing that to us, or us to them. Of becoming a place where we accumulate ideas that are most pertinent in a moment of passing. That resonate based on our own experiences. Maybe I cannot finish because I am still not sure what my experience lends me to look for in this end.